Fiesta Queen

Somewhere in northern Spain, October 10, 2012 – Again, Sasha’s not here. I went twice to the bus station to meet his bus on Sept. 16. No Sasha! What happened? Where the hell was he?

He had finally got out of the hospital in Moscow back in August – I still don’t know what the problem was – and sent me the following e-mail:

My darling Dane, I have left the hospital, and now I’m fine. In August, I want to earn a little money so that I will come to you with money.They didn’t return my money for the ticket. But that’s not a problem; I will earn some money. But if I need money from you, I will write you and receive it through Vanya. Okay, honey?My dick is standing; it is big and tasty.I kiss you,Your Sasha

Of course, I wrote him immediately:

My darling Sasha,

How mindlessly glad I am that you are well again. Okay, honey, if you want to earn some money in August, that will be okay.

It’s too bad that they didn’t return your money :-(

But please don’t wait too long. I miss you very much. I am very horny and want to gobble your pipiska :-) Are you coming early in September? Yes, of course, if you need money, I will send it, my darling.

Again, I am delighted to know that you are no longer in the hospital. Come as soon as you can.

I love you very much, and miss you deeply,

Your Dane

And so he dragged through August. I sent him money and my debit card information to use to catch the bus to Spain from Moscow Sept. 14. He was to arrive here at 8 p.m. on the 16th.

But he wasn’t on the bus – or on the one that arrived two hours later.

He had no mobile phone. The only way I had of reaching him was through the Internet. So later that night I sent him an e-mail – wherever he was – and hoped to hell he’d get it:

My darling Sasha,It’s already 11:15 at night, and you’re not here. Where are you? What happened? What can I do other than worry? I’m eagerly waiting for you, my dear. I kiss you and miss youYour Dane

He got it! The next day, I received an e-mail reply from him:

My dear Dane,

Don’t worry, I am in Madrid. I’m fine. I’m living in a hotel. I am resting a little in Madrid, and then I will go to you. I will tell you when I’m arriving.I kiss you and love you,Sasha

I immediately replied, and tried not to let my irritation show too much. Why for chris’ sake did he detour in Madrid when he is allegedly panting to see me?

My dear Sasha, Why have you already spent two days in Madrid? Where are you getting the money for a hotel? Do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend in Madrid you’re staying with? If so, that’s fine, only tell me. Please write.I’m waiting,Your Dane

The next day I wrote again:

My darling Sasha,When are you coming? I am eagerly, eagerly waiting for you.I love you and kiss you.Your Dane

The next day, Sept. 20, he replied again:

My dear Dane,

I’m fine. I’m in Madrid. I am working in a café, because I need money. For that reason I can’t immediately come to you. They offered me good work for a month, and I decided to take it, in order to earn money. I want to come to you with money, and give you a little. How are things with you? I don’t always have access to Internet, and for that reason write you not so often, unfortunately. I love you, and eagerly await our meeting.Your Sasha

Of course I immediately replied:

My darling Sasha,How happy I am to hear from you, to know that everything is okay with you and that you have a good job.I have to again leave Spain in order to renew my visa before the 14th of October. Since you are working for a month, I will leave the 12th or 13th of October, and return either the 17th or 18th. So can you come after that? Or maybe we can meet in Madrid and travel here together on the bus?I’m fine, but I miss you. All the same, I’m glad that you found work, and hope that you are okay.Remember, that I have enough for us both, if you don’t like your work.I very eagerly await our meeting, my darling.I kiss you, miss you, and love you very much.Your Dane

My pee had been getting progressively more reticent for weeks – maybe months. I don’t remember when it started, but by the end of September, I was spending a long time sitting on the john and straining. Sometimes a little shit would emerge. Sometimes, but not always, a little pee would also make its way out.

Oh-oh! Something physically is wrong with me. Very bad timing. By Tuesday, Sept. 25, it had gotten even worse, so Vanya and I caught a cab to the emergency room.I was in real pain. I couldn’t pee and my bladder was hurting.

Vanya and I registered me, and after a short time I was ushered into a “box,” an examining room, and into a hospital gown. The nurse gave me a bottle to piss in, but I could only produce a few drops. I was a hurtin’ scooter ☹

A very handsome male nurse named Fernando who spoke some English showed up, so Vanya and I both engaged him in conversation.

When we told him I couldn’t pee, he went to the doctor to inform her, and came back with a female nurse. He pulled my shorts off, cleaned my dick with alcohol, and rammed a tube up my urethra to my bladder. Surprisingly, it hurt very little – maybe because he was holding my dick ☺

Over the next couple of hours, I lay on the gurney and pissed into a plastic bottle. Almost two liters of pee poured out!

At about 5 p.m., the doctor came and told me I had no infections or cancer, and that my blockage was caused by a swollen prostate! She told me to leave the tube in my dick for 10 days and gave me a prescription for some antibiotics to prevent infection and for something to reduce the swelling of my prostate.

When I finally got home that evening, the following e-mail was awaiting me from Sasha:

My dear Dane,I want to buy a ticket to come to you on the 21st of October. Is that day okay for you? You’re not busy that day the 21st, Sunday? I kiss you, Your Sasha

So he is coming at last – maybe. I answered:

My darling Sasha,Of course, come the 21st. It’s great! In the meantime, I will go to Morocco and I will be out of my mind glad to see you ☺I hope everything is okay with you.I miss you, kiss youI love you, hug you, and wait for your sausage ☺Your Dane

On the 26th, I got another message from him:

My dear Dane,

I too am very happy that the 21st of October we will see each other and will be together! We will kiss each other and play with my sausage!

Dane, I want to buy a card for the Internet because it’s cheaper. Can I again use your bank card? The Internet card costs 35 euros. When I arrive at your place, I will repay you. Okay? Only now I don’t have my own credit/debit card; for that reason I have to ask you. Forgive me.

I kiss you and love you,

I immediately replied:

My darling Sasha,

Of course you can. Do you have the information or do I need to send it again?

What time your bus arriving on the 21st, at 8 p.m.?

I am very eagerly waiting for you, my darling. With pleasure I will play with your sausage ☺ But hurry, because I am forgetting my Russian language ☹

I love you, miss you, and kiss you.

Your Dane

After the banks had closed on Friday afternoon, Sept. 28th, the last working day of the month, I received a response from Sasha:

My dear Dane,

Thank you very much! How I want to hug you and kiss you, and give you my sausage!

I tried again to buy an Internet card with your American bank card, but was unsuccessful. If you have a Spanish bank card, then send me, please, this information.

Yes, I am coming at 8 p.m.

How are you, my dear, how’s your health?

I kiss you and love you,

Your Sasha

Of course I immediately replied:

My darling Sasha,

I also want to hug you, kiss you, and eat your sausage ☺ And so I will be at the bus station at 8 p.m. on the 21st. I am eagerly awaiting you.

Yes, honey, I have a Spanish debit card from Bank Caishanova (now Novagalicia).

In giving him the data, I noticed that the card expired on the last day of September ☹ -- two days away, and the banks were already closed – probably for the weekend. They probably wouldn’t open till the following Monday, October 1. So I wrote:

I just noticed that it expires this month. I will try to renew it tomorrow (the banks are already closed today). I don’t know if the banks are open tomorrow, but I will try. If not tomorrow, on Monday, and of course I will tell you. In the meantime, maybe you can use my old card.

Good luck, honey.

How I love you and miss you.

I eagerly await you,

Your Dane

When the banks were, true to form, closed on Saturday, I wrote:

My darling Sasha,

As I feared, the banks are closed today ☹ I will apply for a new card on Monday, but probably I will have to wait two or three days to receive it. In the meantime, try to buy time on the Internet using my old card. By the way, I think I wrote “sabado,” Spanish for Saturday, in my last e-mail instead of “subbota.” I told you I am forgetting my Russian language. You’d better hurry ☺ In the meantime, you can use your Russian-Spanish dictionary ☺

I hope you are successful. Tell me whether you are or not.

I am eagerly waiting for you,

I love you and kiss you

Your Dane

Later Saturday I had another e-mail from him:

My dear Dane,

Last night I played with my sausage and thought of you!

Today I tried to buy an Internet card with your old card. But you forgot to give me your code. When I receive the code, I will try again.

I love you very much, and await our meeting. My sausage says a big hello to you.

Your Sasha

So I sent him my code, adding tell your sausage hello from me. Very soon we will be together ☺

I immediately received a reply:

My dear Dane,Now I’m not able to buy an Internet card. Maybe your card is already outdated. Write me, please, when you get your new card, and I will try to buy a card again.

With love,

Your Sasha

So on Monday, Oct. 1, I got my new Spanish bank card and sent him all the information, adding:I hope that now you will be able to buy an Internet card. I am eagerly, eagerly awaiting you ☺ Only three weeks ☺ I love you very much. Your Dane P.S. Write and tell me whether you were able to get the card.

But I heard nothing from him over the next couple of days, so on Wednesday, Oct. 3, I wrote again:My darling Sasha, Did you get an Internet card? I hope so. I am waiting for you. Your Dane

On Monday, Vanya and I went back to the hospital to get the bill. Before the American-manufactured recession, Spain used to have free medical care for all immigrants and tourists. But the right wing government elected last fall changed all that, and now non-Spanish citizens have to pay for their care. It’s only fair after all, but it hurts poor little girls like me ☹

After being shuttled around the hospital, I finally got the bill: 351 euros. My god! I wouldn’t even have that much until I got my America social security check!

The American comedian George Burns, in describing how he didn’t worry, once told a story about his medical bill:

I can honestly say I wasn’t even uptight about my heart bypass several years ago…When I came ’round from the anesthetic, I heard the surgeon say, “George, you did great. You’re just fine.” I said, “Doctor, I wasn’t the least bit concerned.” “Really?” he said. “I was a nervous wreck.” Even that didn’t bother me. Then he handed me the bill and I passed out.”

So when they handed me the bill, I nearly passed out. Even so, it was probably a hell of a lot less than having your bladder drained and piss tubes inserted in an American emergency room. Fortunately, I’ve never had the pleasure.

But I still haven’t mentioned to Sasha that I was having health problems. For one thing, I think it might scare him off. For another, I hope to hell it doesn’t happen again.

A week later, October 8, I went back to the hospital to have the tubes pulled out of my dick and to see if I was peeing normally. I was ☺

That evening, I realized I hadn’t heard from Sasha in a week. I checked my Spanish bank account, and nothing had been taken out of it. I wrote a worried e-mail:

My darling Sasha,I haven’t heard from you in a long time, and I notice my account hasn’t changed, which means, I think, that you weren’t successful in buying an Internet card ☹ I’m sorry, honey. I sent you all the information ☹By the way, I’m going on the bus to Morocco on Thursday, and will be at the Mendez Alvaro Station in Madrid from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Thursday, if you’re able to meet me. If not, I understand that you are working and can’t come.In any case, I’m awaiting you here at 8 p.m. on the 21st of October. I love you and miss you very much my darling.Soon we will be together ☺Your Dane

And so again, I wait and hope he will be on the bus Oct. 21. But frankly, I’m beginning to feel like Charlie Brown after Lucy pulled the football out of his kicking range at the beginning of the football season every year: I’m growing very skeptical, but I want desperately to believe he is coming and that we will soon be living and loving together in our Spanish Shangri-La. What’s more, if he doesn’t come, it’s going to blow hell out my book, Life Begins at 80.

In the meantime, the U.S. elections are coming up, and you must make up your mind whether to vote for Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee. In either case, the 1% will win. My money is on Obama, but if Romney should pull the election out of the hat, my only consolation will be that it is bringing the revolution in America a little closer.

James Howard Kunstler, author of The End of Suburbia and The Long Emergency, and who is as despairing of the American future as I, wrote an article recently that was carried on the EnergyResources web site with the following introductory remarks by Denis Frith, an energy guru from Australia:

“Kunstler expounds on what is happening in the operations of society, with particular emphasis on the US due to the decisions, good and bad, being made by the elite,” writes Frith. “He presents a dismal, but realistic, picture…

“How will society, and the elite in particular respond as the climate changes, natural resources, including oil, become scarce, global food production can no longer meet demand as fertilizers become scarce and soil fertility declines, the marine food chain deteriorates due largely to ocean acidification, cities and other infrastructure disintegrates due to lack of maintenance, together with numerous other deleterious effects?”

Following is Kunstler’s article, entitled “What Does It Mean?”

In the word-cloud of current events, the phrase "parasitic financial system" billows up to a degree that suggests even so-called thinking persons begin to understand what's happening: that banking shenanigans are sucking the life out of advanced societies. That's why Matt Taibbi's metaphor of Goldman Sachs as "a Vampire Squid jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" remains so potent years after it was minted.

Of course the pervasive accounting fraud and routine swindling that drive the banking "industry" are abetted by the phantom government "policy" of the Federal Reserve, an institution that 99.999 percent of the American public could not explain under threat of water-boarding. The bottom line is political and economic leadership that can only pretend the economy works, and the destiny of such pretense is the death of legitimacy - meaning the public's faith in the system.

Sooner or later either the public will revolt against such a system, or the system will just implode and leave the public floundering in a period of dreadful chaos.

Nobody capable of thinking through these rather abstruse matters believes Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke anymore, and his demeanor in public is of a depressed person who has lost belief in himself and what he does. He announced last week's (late September) policy salvo - the long-awaited QE-3 (Quantitative Easing, 3rd round) -- with absolutely no conviction. The Fed will spend $ 40 billion a month in money created out of thin air to buy non-performing mortgages from banks eager to dump them and interest rates on new mortgages will fall to record low levels. This will supposedly "stimulate" the housing market.

Virtually nobody else out there in blog-and-pundit land will tell you what this so-called "housing market" is, so I will.

It basically refers to suburban sprawl, which I have previously defined in two ways: 1) the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world, and 2) a living arrangement with no future.

The first proposition is obviously a function of the second. Interestingly, one of the first effects of Ben Bernanke's QE3 salvo was the inflation of oil prices to nearly $ 100-a-barrel, with a flow-through effect of gasoline above $ 4 at the pump, which only shortens the horizon of the suburban sprawl paradigm. Like the zombie banks choking on bad mortgages, sprawl is dead but doesn't know it.

Unfortunately, the suburban sprawl system was interchangeable with the wormy old political chestnut known as the American Dream. Consider that the hysterical extremism ruling Republican politics derives from terror over the death of that flimsy dream - a home of our own, behind the strip mall! They can't believe it's over, that it's lost its value, that they're stuck with the losses, and they're looking for someone to blame for it. All the rest of their blather is just the noise of dissociated anxiety - the religious idiocy, the exceptionalism fairy tale, the family values touted by closet cases, the military chauvinism.

Among the many tragic ramifications of the dynamic is that the final blowout of sprawl-building which ran roughly from the early 1990s to 2007 - and peaked, you may notice, with the final blowout of cheap oil ($ 11 a barrel in 1999) - became one of two intertwined activities that propped up the US economy.

The other was, of course, the expansion of the financial "industry" to about 40 percent of all economic activity, largely based on fraud in mortgage issuance and the repackaging of that debt in booby-trapped bundles of MBS, CDOs, and other instruments that have been destroying banks, governments, retirement funds, and individual investment accounts like a long-running hemorrhagic fever.

The results of that orgy can be seen now: an over-supply of suburban buildings of all kinds (houses, strip malls, box stores) that will continue to lose value, and a banking system disabled by ruined balance sheets.

There's no remedy for this except acknowledging losses on the grand scale, writing them off, making the necessary lifestyle adjustments to the write-offs, and making a fresh start with an economy based on something other than suburban sprawl building and banking fraud.

American politics can't accept this. Neither party understands the contraction underway throughout the industrial world and the very different future it portends.

Despite the pervasive fraud and incessant central bank interventions, there are routine operations of money that must go on for societies to remain stable. Checks or transactions have to be cleared, payments must be made, letters of credit must be issued to permit the exchange of goods and commodities between nations, bonds must be rolled over, markets must allow truthful asset price and interest rate discovery, currencies must hold their value. The terrible stresses being applied by central banks to avoid acknowledging systemic losses threaten to paralyze these routine operations of money. Too many things can go wrong now.

The fault lines for the moment are crackling along the margins, in foreign lands such as Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen. There is not a whole lot keeping this infection from spreading into Saudi Arabia. The Saud royal family leadership has passed from one king over eighty years old to another.

Nobody knows what will shake out between Israel and Iran. One way or another, an awful lot of the world's oil supply is at stake in that part of the world, and if that gets stoppered or blown up all the central bank machinations ever dreamed up will not avail to save Europe, North America, China, and Japan.

My guess is that the euphoria over QE3 has already passed. The Fed actions of last week will mean nothing except the steady erosion of dollar value, higher food and fuel costs for all us muppets, and increased mistrust between crippled banks, further crippling bank activity, including the routine operations that make civilized life possible.